This snuff bottle community forum is dedicated to the novice, more experienced, and expert collectors. Topics are intended to cover all aspects and types of bottle collecting. To include trials, tribulations, evaluating, identifying, researching, appraisals, and much more.

Among other things, donations help keep the forum free from Google type advertisements, and also make it possible to purchases additional photo hosting MB space.

Hi,I just came across a newspaper article of 1964 (Worcester Gazette) telling the story of the Inman family of Worcester who must have collected hundreds of snuff bottles from 1931 onward. I know some of Marjorie Inman's bottles were sold by Sotheby's in 1977 (I bought two of them). Does anybody have more information about what happened to the rest of the collection?

The discovery of Marjorie Inman's identity was a real detective story, partly researching the internet, partly relying on correspondents in the US.

She lived from 1895 to 1981, first in Worcester Mass., later on in Princeton Mass. She was a daughter of the steel industrial Albert H. Inman (Pratt & Inman), got a BA from Smith College in 1917, was never married, but was a very keen traveller (I don't know if there is any country in the world she didn't visit (maybe Switzerland and Israel?). She gave travel lectures about China, Russia, etc.

One of her relatives told me that "many, many years ago" she was mentioned in the Worcester Gazette. The librarian of Worceter Public Library sent me scans of a sries of articles about her from 1940, 1958, 1959 and 1964. That's were the picture comes from together with further news:

Miss Marjorie Inman (...) exhibited yesterday [sc. in 1964] some specimens her collection at the Worcester Historical Society and will agaiin Dec. 29 at the Princeton Librara. Her brother Chester N. Inman of Worcester had other 0nes, most of them now given to his daughters and son and their children.The bottles are the heritage of their late father, Alfred H. Inman of Worcester. Even more than a collection, however, the bottles are an odd sort of memorial to a tourist's guide in the China that existed briefly between two revoluations, and to his friendship with the Inmans.The guide was Peter Liu. He had studied at Princeton University's college in Peiping, and guided the Inmans when they arrived there in 1931 as a fourday stof on a world cruise (...) The Communists made it the capital again and renamed it Peking in 1949. (...) Liu and the Inmans — Marjorie Inman hatd charmed him by inquiring about a cricket cage; he hadn't known Americans knew about criket cages — corresponded afterward. In 1935 Liu began sending them occasional quantities of Chinese art and artifacts, one shipment running two tons, which Albert Inman sold here to help Lieu and his family live in what was more and more a chaotic time. (...)The snuff bottles that Peter Liu had sent Albert had set aside for himself, remarking: 2I cant't afford to et anyone else have these." They were packed away when Marjorie Inman moved alone to litt 195ve year-around in their Prinecton summer home, 14 years ago [sc. abt 1950]. At the urging of Mrs Thomas Cassidy of Princeton, director of the Worcester Historical Society, Miss Inman recently dusted of the snuff bottlles Peter Liu hat labeled and packed a generation ago, composed a slide-illustrated talk about them, and rediscovered her affection for them and what the represent. (...) [The snuff bottles] in Miss Inman's collection are made of every kind of jade, of ivory, quartz in all colors, criystal, agate, porcelain, ourmaline, coral, amber, soapstone, and carved in heavy relief into layers of cinnabar lacquer. They are carved in shapes ranging from the Immonral of Chinese mythologie to an ear of corn with a worm on it. They are of glass with a figure painted on the inside, and of lapic lazuli."That's all that I know about her...

Thank you for printing all that out! You are a star!Wow! I never heard of her before I saw your first post on this thread. I will ask friends what if anything, they know of her.I had assumed you meant Worcester UK. It did not enter my mind to think of Worcester Mass... Best,Joey